...which led to another interesting page:

...which leads to another page, this one regarding Gordon Pask, progenitor of Conversation Theory -- quite possibly one of the more important lines of thinking we should be considering here:

...which leads to a paper by Pangaro that presents a view on Pask's work:

It is not at all clear where Conversation Theory will lead, but the term Entailment Mesh, as illustrated on

...is particularly intriguing. We are working, in some sense, on the social construction of knowledge:

...(another page on augumentation of intellect, talking about USENET, Pask, and other stuff -- found at Google looking up "entailment mesh").

Another page: Bootstrapping knowledge representations: from entailment meshes via semantic nets to learning webs by Francis Heylighen...

...is particularly germain to this line of thinking (read: required reading).

At its roots, Augment is about enhancing human intellect. Human intellect is the topic of raging debates, and I tend to stand with those who follow the constructivist line of reasoning. In the end, we must find a way to implement Doug's vision and in my judgement, that will require that we essentially adopt some mode of representation of knowledge. To get to the place where we have chosen a representation scheme, we will need to go through a variety of use cases and scenarios as a means to discover the many ways in which users will cause their intellect to be enhanced.

As I see it, Doug has written a lot and spoken widely on his vision for this project and we should pay closer attention to his words.

My take on them, and not a particularly deep one yet, is that he has spent many years dealing with the syntactic/physical constraints on an Augment system. He has devised a variety of tools (e.g. mouse), methods (click and double click combined with keystrokes -- these days known as "accelerators"), and so forth. In my naive judgement, Augment spent less time on an internal representation scheme that would allow users to manipulate knowledge to attain a multitude of views of that knowledge. Doug has focused on the Transcoding approach, one which I think will be of great importance to the final product.

Eric, at the last meeting, took a straw vote that showed use cases to be at the top of the list, but his vote failed to consider the more than three posts to this list regarding Doug's "vector", one which put solving Transcoding at the top of the list. I personally believe that usecases and transcoding should share the top of the list. Issues of licensing and so forth could/should be placed far behind in an agenda. Usecases, and transcoding will tell us what we need to fill in for knowledge representation, and, in my judgement, we will not get a DKR worthy of our efforts unless we do pay attention to the representation issues at hand. The URLs listed above are just a tiny view into an enormous space, one with which I believe we must become familiar.

My $0.02

Sincerely,

Jack Park
jackpark@verticalnet.com